Let’s be honest, we Inland Empire residents have annoyed friends and relatives from Kansas to Maine for more than a century, going on and on and on about how wonderful we have it here in our latter-day Eden.

We do offer sympathy to our snow-bound friends in February while trying to decide if we need that sweater during a round of golf or a day in the park.

But it’s not always perfect in paradise, as our ancestors discovered during a couple of nasty weeks in July 1899. A drought plaguing the region got that much worse when water sources suddenly just dried up. Then came the threat that there’d be no street lights at night. And we had 11 earthquakes over three days.

Yikes!

From about 1898 until 1905, Southern California was impacted with one of recurring periods of drought about which we are all very familiar. It really struck home that July in San Bernardino. The city then used artesian wells — water sources which flow without pumps — for part of its water supply, and one day everything stopped flowing.

“Practically every artesian well in the city south of Fifth street failed yesterday, many of them having flowed constantly for many years without ever an interruption before,” noted the San Bernardino Sun of July 29.

There was some panic and confusion everywhere. Finally, it was discovered that someone had reopened several previously inactive nearby wells, sharply dropping the watertable. And worse of all, it turned out the precious water was being sold by its owner to fill a canal benefitting the city’s rival, Riverside!

A meeting was called at City Hall for seemingly indignant residents on the 28th to deal with the horror of the city’s water being shipped out of town. When only 6 people showed up for this event, The Sun the following day was apoplectic.

“Such an exhibition of listlessness, of wanton carelessness, of genuine blown-in-the-bottle laziness and mossbackism we have never seen before,” erupted The Sun.

“Out of pure and adulterated inaction, we permit this priceless heritage to be filched by strangers, to be taken to make others rich, to cause distant fields to blossom while our own grow desolate.”

And while this water issue, which would later be resolved in the courts, continued to fester, San Bernardino’s Board of Trustees (early-day City Council) shook up the citizens a few days earlier by abruptly voting to shut off all the street lights.

“The City Will Be In Darkness,” was the headline July 19, when the board cancelled its contract with the San Bernardino Electric Co., ordering it to turn off the street lights. The city cited lousy service, incomplete construction and costs.

And, of course, for providing power, the company was the only show in town. To the company’s credit, it didn’t turn off the lights, despite the threat of not being paid for the service. Part of the issue was the fact that much of its electricity was being generated by water power, and local streams were just too low to fulfill the need, causing some outages.

Ultimately, the issue was resolved, but dark San Bernardino streets were a constant threat for some time.

And finally, just to keep us humble, Mother Nature decided to join in the chaos by delivering an array of earthquakes between July 21 and 23. The strongest was estimated at magnitude 5.75 about 12:50 p.m. on the 22nd, centered in Lytle Creek canyon.

Landslides above what today is Upland and Rancho Cucamonga filled the air with a huge plume of dust. Water crews in Cucamonga Canyon found a slide of rocks had wiped out a quarter mile of their access road.

An unnamed man who had the misfortune of camping in Lytle Creek canyon at the time said, “The roar of the rocks was something awful to hear, and the sun was almost obscured by the clouds of dust,” the Chino Champion quoted the camper Aug. 11.

Chunks of plaster were torn loose from the walls at Central School in Chino by the tremors. In San Bernardino, there were plenty of large cracks in buildings throughout the downtown and in the Santa Fe Railroad yards, but apparently few injuries and no deaths.

The shaking paled in comparison to a far-stronger quake later on Christmas in Riverside County that rocked the area causing numerous deaths and great property damage, especially in San Jacinto and Hemet.

But among all the people affected in those July days by earthquakes and worry over loss of water or street lights, there were four whose attitudes provided an island of calm through it all.

During the strongest quake, “the Arrowhead Club rooms were depopulated in a fraction of a second except the four whist players who deliberately went on with the game,” wrote The Sun on July 22, “and were surprised an hour afterwards to be told of the earthquake.”

Joe Blackstock writes on Inland Empire history. He can be reached at joe.blackstock@gmail.com or Twitter @JoeBlackstock

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